Garrison Keillor has recently read the work of poet and father Jerry Roscoe on Writer’s Almanac. Read and listen to November 28, 2009’s rendition of Bouquet. From September 2, 2007, you can hear a reading of Adequate Love.

Of course, if you like what you hear, you can pick up a copy of The Unexamined Life by Jerry Roscoe on Amazon.

The best intellectual moments I’ve had come from a mixing of disciplines. Maybe the first times I really felt this is freshman year of college, taking English Literature courses, Economics, third-year Calculus, and a seminar on the last 100 years in Germany. Keith Gessen recently mentioned the parallel development of literature in a piece on DFW, “In the 1920s you have your Russian modernists and your Anglo-American modernists and German modernists, and they’re all very much alike but that makes sense because they knew each other and all read the same books, but you’ll also, if you look, find Bulgarian modernists and Portuguese modernists, and so on.” What’s always fascinated me is the zeitgeist carries across disciplines as well — modernism, for example, doesn’t just refer to thematically unlinked movements in different disciplines; modernism is a term that gets at something essential underlying intellectual pursuits from math to literature to philosophy to economics.Continue reading →

With the end of school mid-May, the start of summer employment, and my move to Brooklyn, I’ve been doing more of my reading underground. Specifically, in trains. Instead of feverish — if sporadic — two-hundred page evenings of devotion, I now wade through books as the tortoise, not the hare. Reading on trains, twice a day, on average 34 minutes per trip, has altered the texture of daily life, the ways I experience New York. Instead of being a slave to The Savage Detectives, I cohabitate with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 2666. Fewer late nights in the living room on the couch, having been kicked out of the bedroom by my employed girlfriend, unable to not keep following Arturo Belano and our collective fate of obscurity, (or worse, happenstance notoriety) through Mexico, Europe, and South America, the atmosphere occasionally ruptured by poltergeists driving death-laden semis, shaking the apartment.

Even askance glances at other commuters are changed. My aesthetics heightened to some absurd transcendent level where it feels like I understand the totality of everyone around me, their inner sum from their appearance. Or maybe I don’t feel I understand anything at all, but merely take in the passengers’ appearances in a hungry, superficial visual chomp. I smile. Even if it’s illusion, I laugh at all of us. Or at least that’s what 2666 has done to me.

You are the nighttime devil’s semis
burning down the warehouse road
crashing through potholes in dropped toolbox cacophony
echoes off walls,
clanging.

I know it’s your
poltergeist locomotion
death driving a furnace
fueled by suicide
driven to death.
Obsession pushes my head under water.
A junkyard dog mutters nightmares lodged in his throat.
The harbinger left.
I wait.

Washington Square Park opened again either today or yesterday. It was odd to have a whole in the middle of the area. Standing in the middle of the park, finally, this part of town between Broadway and 6th Avenue makes a little more sense to me.

Here’s a not-so-great photo and poem to commemorate the occasion. Perhaps a form of rellenar las ausencias.Continue reading →